The Unknown Universe: A New Exploration of Time, Space and Cosmology

On March 21, 2013, the European Space Agency released a map of the afterglow of the big bang. Taking in 440 sextillion kilometers of space and 13.8 billion years of time, it is physically impossible to make a better map: We will never see the early universe in more detail. On the one hand, such a view is the apotheosis of modern cosmology; on the other, it threatens to undermine almost everything we hold cosmologically sacrosanct.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).

Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book: The Mowgli Stories

Audie Award, Excellence in Production; Audie Award, Audio Drama, 2016. The magical storytelling and unforgettable characters in Ben Doyle and Richard Kurti's audio adaptation of this children's classic have been brought to life by many well-known voices from British film, TV, radio and comedy.

Mrs. Dalloway

It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft tackles the wasted potential she sees in women, refusing to see them as inferior to men; she decries their limitations and suggests that they are worthy of an equal standard of education, and that they should be taught to develop their own reason, not simply how to gain a man. Written in 1792, at the height of the French Revolution, A Vindication is an eloquent and persuasive response to the prevailing attitudes of the time.

English Grammar Boot Camp

Grammar! For many of us, the word triggers memories of finger-wagging schoolteachers, and of wrestling with the ambiguous and complicated rules of using formal language. But what is grammar? In fact, it's the integral basis of how we speak and write. As such, a refined awareness of grammar opens a world of possibilities for both your pleasure in the English language and your skill in using it, in both speech and the written word.

American Philosophy: A Love Story

In American Philosophy, John Kaag - a disillusioned philosopher at sea in his marriage and career - stumbles upon a treasure trove of rare books on an old estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that once belonged to the Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. The library includes notes from Whitman, inscriptions from Frost, and first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As he begins to catalog and preserve these priceless books, Kaag rediscovers the very tenets of American philosophy.

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves

Nearly everyone swears - whether it's over a few too many drinks, in reaction to a stubbed toe, or in flagrante delicto. And yet we sit idly by as words are banned from television and censored in books. We insist that people excise profanity from their vocabularies, and we punish children for yelling the very same dirty words that we'll mutter in relief seconds after they fall asleep. Swearing, it seems, is an intimate part of us that we have decided to selectively deny.

Dandelion Wine

Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. Dandelion Wine stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semi-autobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928.

Loner: A Novel

David Federman has never felt appreciated. An academically gifted yet painfully forgettable member of his New Jersey high school class, the withdrawn, mild-mannered freshman arrives at Harvard fully expecting to be embraced by a new tribe of high-achieving peers. But, initially, his social prospects seem unlikely to change, sentencing him to a lifetime of anonymity. Then he meets Veronica Morgan Wells. Struck by her beauty, wit, and sophisticated Manhattan upbringing, David falls feverishly in love.

Hidden River

Alexander Lawson is a former detective for Northern Ireland's police force. After a disastrous six-month stint in the drug squad, he became addicted to heroin and resigned in disgrace. Now 24, sickly, and on the dole, Alex learns that his high-school love, Victoria Patawasti, has been murdered in America. Victoria's wealthy family sends Alex to Colorado to investigate the case, and he seizes the opportunity for a chance at redemption.

Rising Sun: A Novel

A riveting thriller of corporate intrigue and cutthroat competition between American and Japanese business interests. On the forty-fifth floor of the Nakamoto tower in downtown Los Angeles - the new American headquarters of the immense Japanese conglomerate - a grand opening celebration is in full swing. On the forty-sixth floor, in an empty conference room, the corpse of a beautiful young woman is discovered.

Hurry Up and Meditate

In his thought-provoking and entertaining book, David Michie explains the nuts and bolts of meditation. As a busy professional, as well as long-term meditator, he also gives a first-hand account of how to integrate this transformational practice into everyday life. Combining leading edge science with timeless wisdom, Hurry Up and Meditate provides all the motivation and tools you need to achieve greater balance, better health and a more panoramic perspective on life.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: The Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection. At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

Set in the pre-Christian world of Glome on the outskirts of Greek civilization, it is a tale of two princesses: the beautiful Psyche, who is loved by the god of love himself, and Orual, Psyche's unattractive and embittered older sister, who loves Psyche with a destructive possessiveness. Her frustration and jealousy over Psyche's fate sets Orual on the troubled path of self-discovery. Lewis's last work of fiction, this is often considered his best by critics.

The Strangler Vine

India, 1837: William Avery is a young soldier with few prospects except rotting away in campaigns in India; Jeremiah Blake is a secret political agent gone native, a genius at languages and disguises, disenchanted with the whole ethos of British rule, but who cannot resist the challenge of an unresolved mystery.

The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History

We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life, supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and the humble peppercorn drove the Age of Discovery, so did coffee beans help fuel the Enlightenment and cottonseed help spark the Industrial Revolution. And from the fall of Rome to the Arab Spring, the fate of nations continues to hinge on the seeds of a Middle Eastern grass known as wheat.

Greyhound

Sebastien Ranes’s single mom and her feckless boyfriend can’t be bothered to take care of a stuttering 12-year-old. Banished to live with his grandmother on the far side of the country, the boy can barely understand a bus schedule when he gets dumped at the Greyhound station in Stockton, California. Given $35 and a one-way ticket to Altoona, Pennsylvania, Sebastien must cross the country - alone, without a clue how to fend for himself. Filled with youthful anger and naïveté, Sebastien heads out into the "Morning in America" of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s.

Up from Slavery

Booker T. Washington fought his way out of slavery to become an educator, statesman, political shaper, and proponent of the "do-it-yourself" idea. In his autobiography, he describes his early life as a slave on a Virginia plantation, his steady rise during the Civil War, his struggle for education, his schooling at the Hampton Institute, and his years as founder and president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which was devoted to helping minorities learn useful, marketable skills.

Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us About Crime

The dead talk - to the right listener. They can tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died, and, of course, who killed them. Forensic scientists can unlock the mysteries of the past and help serve justice using the messages left by a corpse, a crime scene, or the faintest of human traces.

American Gods [TV Tie-In]

Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life. But just days before his release, Laura and Shadow's best friend are killed in an accident. With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger he meets on the way home, an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday.

Notes of a Native Son

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.

The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die

"Take her out back and finish her off." She doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t know where she is, or why. All she knows when she comes to in a ransacked cabin is that two men are arguing over whether or not to kill her.And that she must run.

Billy Budd, Sailor

Written some 40 years after Moby Dick, Melville's Billy Budd is a moving tale of good versus evil. Set aboard a British navy ship at the end of the eighteenth century, a young, innocent sailor's charm and good nature put the men around him at ease. Ship life agreed with Billy. He made friends quickly and was well liked, which infuriated John Claggart, the ship's cold-blooded superior officer.

Publisher's Summary

"Big Sur's a humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac, a superior novelist who had strength to complete his poetic narrative, a task few scribes so afflicted have accomplished...others crack up. Here we meet San Francisco's poets and recognize hero Dean Moriarty 10 years after On the Road. Jack Kerouac was a 'writer,' as his great peer W.S. Burroughs says, and here at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with 'Sea,' a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur." - Allen Ginsberg

This novel is sometimes mistakenly viewed as a drunkalogue by a practicing alcoholic on the verge of insanity. But while Jack Kerouac was a sometime crazy booze hound, he was also a very insightful writer. And yes, when he was living through this particular bad San Francisco trip, he was a sometimes drunk and full-time crackup. However. When he got back home to his mother's house on the East Coast and wrote this book in the solitude that protected his gift, he was clear-eyed. In the hours and days of his lucidity, he detailed his alcoholism, he unflinchingly recorded the flaws in his character that brought on his nervous breakdown. So here we have the Beat Generation not as the Disney characters of nostalgia but as the good, bad and ugly people they were when a very introverted Catholic/Buddhist writer with a ton of talent hung out with them and hung in with them to the point of his own self-destruction.

Tom Parker, as always, does a great job bringing these mostly long-dead voices back to life.

Parker is an excellent reader.
Big Sur is a monologue, a descent into Kerouac's alcoholic Inferno. Kerouac could only write this having come out of it--for a time--but while I listened to Parker speaking to me in Kerouac's voice, I too felt the need for some stability, some sense of permanence in this all too hectic world.
And while Robinson Jeffers is the better Big Sur poet ("Continent's End" et. al.), this novel elicits the state of mind of an unstable man coming into this landscape to be nearly wholly worn down by the rhythms of the sea, the landscape, humanity and his own disease.
There is humor here too, but I responded strongly to the tragic elements in Parker's evocative reading of this powerful book.
(Parker really gets Cody's voice, just like he got McMurphy's in Kesey's novel--they're similar characters. I can't wait for him to record Visions of Cody.)

Jack Kerouacs prose, like that of James Joyce, gets into your head and races over the reticulations and slaloms down the grooves kicking up powder everywhere. Once you have tasted his best work there is no going back to the safety of the restrained and structured prose of Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Big Sur is arguably one of Kerouacs best novels. It documents the personal crests and troughs between his initial fame that catapults him into the limelight and a downhill slide to what eventually becomes a self-destructive, terminal binge. It takes a much brighter look at his experience tower sitting on Desolation Peak than does Desolation Angels. Tom Parkers narration does justice to both the pace and tone of Kerouacs voice. Leave your slippers and smoking jacket at home and put on your walking shoes. Big Sur is waiting just over the edge of the Pacific bluffs.

The legacy of the Beat generation has been reduced to two or three books and this is not one of them. So imagine my surprise finding myself enjoying this story when I couldn't stand reading On The Road. Maybe it's because I was listening this time. Hats off to both the narrator and writer for engaging me!

As with Dharma Bums, Tom Parker's reading performance of Kerouac's later work in Big Sur enlivens and adds great nuance and animation to the material. I've found this one to be a surprising unknown gem, with Kerouac revisiting old pals, wrestling with celebrity and alcohol and his own monkey mind. It's wonderfully human and frustrating to read of Jack gradually abandoning the hard to attain dharma principles, and drinking himself to death.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Big Sur?

There's the uncomfortable hot tub gathering in Big Sur, and his stay with Willamine "Billie" at her apartment in SF.

I might listen to it again because Kerouac is my favorite writer... BUT Tom Parker's nasally voice is really hard to take.

I don't know anything about Parker's audiobook resume, but he sounds like he probably is a former sports announcer or something. Nothing against him personally, but how he was selected to read a classic novel such as "Big Sur" is beyond me. He certainly has the dramatic skill, but I found the sound of his voice to be almost unbearable.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Big Sur?

There is a part in the middle of the story where he describes the waves of twenty-something hipsters who find him, expecting to see the young Kerouac of yore, but instead meet this ailing, alcoholic middle-aged guy. The emotional impact of this was very strong for me -- Jack's sadness and despair, telling the story from the standpoint of the downward arc of his career, after the peak of his fame during his lifetime. As Natalie Merchant & Rob Buck wrote in the song "Hey Jack Kerouac", he "chose his words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood", and there he was himself wandering around the dark woods near Big Sur.

What aspect of Tom Parker’s performance would you have changed?

Replace him with another narrator.

If you could take any character from Big Sur out to dinner, who would it be and why?

Jack Duluoz, Kerouac's alter ego character, of course.

Any additional comments?

I'm hoping this is not a trend regarding books on Audible.com, narrators with annoying voices.